September 25, 2010

One of the funnier things that happened in the book world last year
was someone publishing a book made up of the reports Franz Kafka wrote
for his job at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague (see
Books in the City's “The unexpected Kafka”). Now Kafka’s unpublished writings are again in the news, thanks to Elif Batuman (author of The possessed: adventures with Russian books and the people who read them),
who has been to Israel and gotten the story of a legal tug-of-war going
on there between two aged sisters and the National Library of Israel
for the papers of Max Brod, and thus Kafka's papers, and reported on it
in a long and very readable article in The New York Times.

Max Brod was the friend to whom the dying Kafka turned over his
unpublished manuscripts, diaries etc. with the request to burn them.
Taking this as the expression of a mood rather than a conviction, Brod
got three of the manuscripts published (The Trial, Amerika and The Castle) and took the remaining papers with him when he escaped to Israel just as the Nazis were about to close the Czech borders.

Except Brod (dead), no one has really seen those papers except Esther
Hoff, Brod’s assistant and “presumed” lover (also dead) and her two
daughters (alive), who are holding onto them for dear life despite a
strong claim by the National Library of Israel that Brod had never named
their mother his heir, but only his literary executor. This would mean
that on her death the papers would revert to his estate, which he had
stipulated pass to a public library or archive in Israel. The sisters
wish to sell the papers to the German Literature Archive in Marbach,
Germany, to which their mother already sold the manuscript for The Trial for 2,000,000 USD.

I’ve never been able to think of Kafka’s works as German Literature,
despite the fact that in libraries his books are classified as such
because cataloguing rules, which cataloguers never ever break, classify
literature by the language in which it is written. I suppose the
classification which least startles me, when I have seen it in
discussions of Kafka's work, is “Czech-Jewish”. Kafka’s family were Jews
from Bohemia. His grandfather spoke Czech, his father spoke Czech, and
he himself spoke fluent Czech. It was to be more upper-class in a
country which had been conquered by Austro-Hungary that Hermann Kafka, a
man of the middle class with ambitions for his children, decided they
should speak German and that his son Franz should attend the prestigious
German Gymnasium.

Most of all, when I think of Kafka, I think of his birthplace, and
the city he hardly ever left, Prague. Prague with its enormous Jewish
heritage -- at the start of the 18th century more Jews lived in Prague
than anywhere else in the world, Prague, one of the vertices (along with
Turin and Lyon) of the white magic triangle of esoteric legend, Prague
with its “Old New Synagogue” and a clock in the Jewish quarter with
hands which run backwards, Prague whose old town has such tiny streets
and houses that walking in it I felt as if I were Alice in Wonderland
after eating the “Eat me” cake, and whose “new” town is medieval and
crisscrossed by a maze of concealed passageways called things like the
“Lantern” passage (where there is a statue of Wenceslas riding an
upside-down horse), Prague with the golden roofs, but dark and
mysterious too, the city Kafka called “this dear little mother” and then
“with sharp claws”. "She never lets you go," he said.

Milan Kundera, in a very old Granta (1984!) which I got at a
library withdrawn book sale, writes about how much Kafka is inseparable
from Prague and Prague from Kafka. He tells a story to illustrate this.
When a friend of his, the philosopher Karel Kosik, was accused of
counter-revolutionary activities and expelled from Charles University
after the Russians invaded, his sex life immediately "took off" (as
Kundera puts it), his flat becoming besieged by admiring young women.
Kundera asked one of them, a hairdresser, why. “All defendants are
handsome” she replied, using the words of Leni in TheTrial,
amazing Kundera once again with how “the images, situations and even
the individual sentences of Kafka’s novels are part of life in Prague.”

It was when I was reading this story that I realized for the first
time that my grandfather would have been born almost exactly the same
year as Kafka, and not far away, in a village just a hundred kilometers
from Prague. I emailed my uncle to get the exact date so I could
compare. The reply was “My father was born in 1886, so the blackbird was
older" (blackbird being his colloquial translation of the Czech word
‘kavka’, the learned one being 'jackdaw'). So, just three years
difference.

The blackbird/jackdaw is known to have frequented Karlovy Vary, the
famous Czech spa which was also visited by Mozart and Casanova. I wonder
if he was ever served by my grandfather, who worked there for a time as
a waiter at the Grand Hotel Pupp, saving his money to buy a ticket to
America, still just a boy, as they did in those days. That would likely
have been the only place their paths could have crossed – not at the
Prague coffee houses Kafka loved and certainly not at Charles
University. But they did have one other thing in common, as did probably
most young men of that time and place: authoritarian fathers.

Much is made of Kafka’s relationship with his authoritarian father – how when he published A CountryDoctor,
which he dedicated to his father, he gave him a copy and his father
replied ‘Put it on the night table’. In our family story, when my
grandfather was leaving the house at dawn to start his voyage to
America, still in his teens, his father didn’t get out of bed to see him
off, nor let his brothers do so. The story goes that the father said
“We have to work tomorrow. We need our sleep.”

When I was little I took it literally: it was like a Grimm Brothers
fairy tale, the youngest son of the exceedingly poor woodcutter family
setting off to make his fortune, the father who worked so hard he
couldn’t drag himself out of bed. But actually the family owned an inn,
and when, older and aware of that, I heard the story again, I
interpreted it differently: a father's integral, if harsh, statement of disagreement with
his son’s decision,

Kafka is buried in the New Jewish cemetery in Prague. I assumed it
would have been the Old Jewish Cemetery, which my mother had wanted to
take us to visit when she first took us to Prague, but which the regime
of the time had long kept closed, so that all we saw were photographs of
it at the Jewish Museum. I only found out now that he is actually
buried in the New Jewish Cemetery, as the Old Jewish Cemetery, as so
often happens in Europe, was really old, having been founded by a King of Bohemia who appears in The Divine Comedy.

The New Jewish Cemetery was built in the 19th century and was
planned to last one hundred years, the equivalent of 100,000 graves.
Instead, it remains a sort of architectural monument which will probably
never be completely filled. When the Nazis arrived in 1939, there were
118,000 Jews living in the Czech lands; 26,000 managed to get out,
including Max Brod. Of those who remained, 80,000 were murdered by the
Nazis, including all three of Kafka’s sisters.

Is this Kafkaesque or just Czech irony? According to Czech
transport.com, the express train R 354 FRANZ KAFKA goes from Prague
(Czech Republic) to Munich (Germany).